Regarding Winter

I’ve lived in good climate and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate. ~ John Steinbeck

I’m from the South, remember? We get snow when we’ve done something to upset God, which we don’t do very often. ~ Autumn Jordon

In the bleak midwinter / Frosty wind made moan, / Earth stood hard as iron, / Water like a stone; / Snow had fallen, snow on snow, / Snow on snow, / In the bleak midwinter, / Long ago. ~ Christina Rossetti

Winter dawn is the color of metal. The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. ~ Sylvia Plath

Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird. ~ Wallace Stevens

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. ~ Wallace Stevens

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape, the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~ Andrew Wyeth

It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea. ~ Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

I love snow for the same reason I love Christmas: It brings people together while time stands still. Cozy couples lazily meandered the streets and children trudged sleds and chased snowballs. No one seemed to be in a rush to experience anything other than the glory of the day, with each other, whenever and however it happened. ~ Rachel Cohn

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you… In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself. ~ Ruth Stout

It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course. ~ Truman Capote

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. ~ Willa Cather

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night, the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night. ~ Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

Snow falling soundlessly in the middle of the night will always fill my heart with sweet clarity. ~ Novala Takemoto

Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. ~ Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Although it was only six o’clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter’s rough poetry. ~ Théophile Gautier

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground’s frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June. Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers – they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. ~ Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough. ~ Earl Wilson

Snow is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing; it is a tiger in lamb’s clothing. ~ Matthias Zdarsky

A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship. ~ Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. ~ Carl Reiner

Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.” ~ Robert Byrne

I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood. ~ Bill Watterson

Getting an inch of snow is like winning ten cents in the lottery. ~ Bill Watterson

I don’t really like driving in the snow. There’s something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It’s like tumbling into a field of stars. ~ Neil Gaiman

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow. ~ Jeff Valdez

Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation. ~ Sinclair Lewis

Never take a job where winter winds can blow up your pants. ~ Geraldo Rivera

Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

People hit the sauce in a big way all winter. Amidst blizzards they wrestle unsuccessfully with the dark comedy of their lives, laughter trapped in their frigid gizzards. Meanwhile, the mercury just plummets, like a migrating duck blasted out of the sky by some hunter in a cap with fur earflaps. ~ Amy Gerstler, A Severe Lack of Holiday Spirit

Too bad Lassie didn’t know how to ice skate, because then if she was in Holland on vacation in winter and someone said “Lassie, go skate for help,” she could do it. ~ Jack Handy

There are only two seasons: Winter and Baseball. ~ Bill Veeck

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. ~ Rogers Hornsby

The problem with winter sports is that – follow me closely here – they generally take place in winter. ~ Dave Barry

Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do, or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so. ~ Stanley Crawford

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings. ~ Quentin Crisp

Advice is like snow – the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. ~ Mae West

Genius is an African who dreams up snow. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer. ~ Plutarch

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. ~ William Blake

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather. ~ Bill Hicks

There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. ~ Alfred Wainwright

About This Site

This site offers a daily column on current events, and unlike other blogs, in long form. Short posts pointing to this and that and saying "Oh my!" seems a bit lazy. Columns here are an attempt to think things through. If you'd like to come along for the ride, fine. If you have neither the time nor patience for that, that is also fine - you can click on the LINKS tab at the top of the page and visit the sites that offer quick hits. Those provide the raw material for the analyses here.

The views here are mine alone, save for the occasional column from Ric in Paris or comments from key readers, like Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, and others.

Commentary and guest columns are posted here, but there is a sister site, Just Above Sunset Photography, where images are far more important than words. That site is updated daily. Take a look.

JUST ABOVE SUNSET has been online, in various formats, since May 2003. Click on the ABOUT tab at the top of the page for more on that, and a note on who I am.